Letters to David
Irving on this Website

Unless
correspondents ask us not to, this Website
will post selected letters that it
receives, and invite open
debate.

N
R Bainescomments,
Thursday, August 2, 2007, on a remark by David
Irving in the witness box that struck home:
"Sometimes I wish I could go Heathrow Airport and
get on a '747 and take a ten hour flight and land
back in England as it was, as it used to be.
"

Photo
right: arriving at Court

Getting
away from it all

I REMEMBER hearing that you once
made the comment, if it were possible to board a
plane and go back to 1950s England, then you would
gladly do so! At the time I thought that you were
maybe just having a bit of a crack at the black
people in London, but as time goes by I think I can
see more and more what you meant.

The other day I was in the little county town
where I grew up as a kid, and it occurred to me
that the whole place has just changed radically
within the space of a few years. Everywhere,
EVERYWHERE it is crawling of
Poles! All of the traditional little English shops
that I remember visiting with my late grandmother
are gone. In some cases there are even Polish shops
sprung up in their place to cater for the new
inhabitants of the town!

Obviously, I don't have anything against Poles
as a people - but I just don't see why they should
ALL come to
OUR country!? And no doubt
they will soon be joined by millions of Bulgarians,
Serbs, Turks, and so on.

So I think you were absolutely right - if only
one could wind back the clock! (Although in my case
it would be to the 70s not the 50s!)

I heard somewhere that hundreds of thousands of
English people are also leaving every year and
heading for Spain. I would join them if only I
could. . .

Here is the full passage
concerned, Day
15 of the long
trial (page 13
onwards). I had been on the witness stand for
several days by then.

IRVING: What do you mean, where did the
Irvings come from? How far back are we going to
go?

RAMPTON: That is the point, is it not? How
far back do you have to go? Does it matter, Mr
Irving?

IRVING: It does. [. . .
For] somebody born in England of 1938, with
all the values that I grew up in, grew to
respect and admire and love, I regret what has
happened to our country now. Sometimes I wish I
could go Heathrow Airport and get on a '747 and
take a ten hour flight and land back in England
as it was, as it used to be. That is what this
paragraph is saying.

RAMPTON: Yes, it is. It is saying that
England has changed in this regrettable respect,
that now we have all these Black people in
England.

IRVING: One wonderful thing about England,
Mr Rampton, you may disprove of it, is that
privately you are allowed to have your own
private thoughts about the way things go, what
you would call a state of mind, and my state of
mind is that I regret what has happened to the
England I grew up in.

RAMPTON: That, I am afraid, Mr Irving, is
characteristic of people that one may properly
and legitimately call racist, is it
not?

IRVING: Or patriotic. Patriotism is
literally respecting the country that has been
handed to you by your forefathers, by your
parents. . . I do not think there is
anything despicable or disreputable about
patriotism. You wish to call it racism,
that is your choice. I call it patriotism.
Respect and love of the country that I grew up,
the England I was born into.

[. . .]

RAMPTON: You would like it to be the
position, would you not, as with the National
Alliance, that this country was a pure white
Aryan race of people who went back at least as
far as Robert the Bruce, for what
difference it makes, would you not?

IRVING: Well, you heard what I said about
taking off in that '747 and landing back in
England as it was, the England of The Blue
Lamp and Jack Warner, and when there
was no chewing gum on the pavements, and all the
rest of it.

RAMPTON: I will just finish.

IRVING: It is just an old fashioned
attitude, I think. You will probably find that
ninety per cent of Englishmen born at the same
time as me think the same. That is what
democracy is about.